Mostek computer of some sort

[Erik]

Hello all,

I’ve come into possession of a Mostek computer (I’m pretty sure it’s a computer anyway) with a pair of 8” half height floppy drives (Shugart 860s) and three cards.

The cards are roughly 6x4 inches with a 56 finger edge connector on one of the long ends and various connectors on the opposite end (I’m not familiar with these). They are labeled MDX-FLP2 (plugged into the drives – obviously a floppy controller), MDX-SIO (almost certainly a serial IO card) and MDX-CPU3. The last card is the processor card. The main chip appears to be a MOSTEK Z-80 clone which is labeled MK3801N-4, Z80-STI AND ENG. PROTO. There are 8 4564s for 64K RAM on the card along with what are either connectors for serial and/or parallel ports.

The whole box is about the size of a typical rack-mount machine with a plastic case around it. Most parts are tagged as Mostek and most date codes are from the middle of 1982.

Of course it came without software or documentation.

Is anyone familiar with this machine? Does anyone have a boot disk, other software or documentation for it?

Thanks!

Erik

[Dave-C]

Erik,

We use a Mostek MDX-CPU2 with several SIO2 cards, one 16k Ram board, interrupt expander, rack driver and a few other that I can't remember at the moment. The MDX-CPU2 has 6 sockets for ROM's and they contain the software. The SIO2 has two serial ports that can be configured via the on board links for various speeds and DTE or DCE and the IO address of the board. The CPU is a Mostek version of a Z80 running at 4 Mhz.

Dave

[ravuya]

I have a Mostek Z-80 chip sitting in my drawer. Let me get the serial num.

mk3882n-4 (z80-ctc)

[olddataman]

MOSTEK was a spinoff deom Texas Instruments in athe mid 60's or maybe a little later. I have had a couple knock don-drag outs with some people who assumed that the acronym MOSTEK was a shortened name for MOS Technology, the company that designed the 6502 (or maybe stole it from Motrola as Motorola claims) Anyway thsey were one of the first to be licensed by ZILOG to second source the Z-80. I have always thought that the computers they made were intended to be used in the same kind of appllications that the INTEL computers were aimed at. This was generally, the tool used to develop microprocessor based products,
For example, one of Adam Osborne's books was a text on how to incorporate the 8080 into a product to reduce the count of standard IC components. What was so fascinating about the book was that he used a Qume Daisy wheel printer as the example. And he used THREE 8080 microprocessor chips and associated support chips to implement all the functions that the standard machie was capable of which required three or four big printed circuit boards full of TTL and driver chips, while in his example it only took two boards about half the size. What got me about it was that we were getting all of the power of most CP/M computers with just one microprocessor!

[Terry Yager]

I've always been impressed with Sir Clive's 4-chip Z80 designs. Imagine a full-function computer on a board not much bigger than a 6x9 index card, and this in like 1980-ish.

--T